The present invention relates to a tape driving apparatus which operates corresponding to a loaded tape cassette.
A so-called tape streaming drive has been known as a driving apparatus which is capable of recording/reproducing digital data to/from a magnetic tape. Such tape streaming drive is capable of having an enormous amount of recording capacity of several tens to several hundreds of gigabytes, for example, though it depends on the length of the tape in a tape cassette or the storage medium. Therefore, such a tape streaming drive is widely used for backing up data recorded in a medium such as a hard disk of a computer main body. It is also considered to be suitable for use in storing image data or the like of large data size.
The tape cassette is a so-called removable medium which can be discharged out of the tape streaming drive. Accordingly, data recorded in the same tape cassette may be reproduced by another tape streaming drive or data may be recorded thereto by a different tape streaming drive.
Holes called xe2x80x9cindex holesxe2x80x9d are provided at certain positions of a case of the tape cassette, so as to be able to identify the type of the tape cassette. In this way, the tape streaming drive can detect the format type, tape length, tape thickness, type of magnetic substance, and the like of the loaded tape cassette.
The number of index holes is limited, however, due to a problem such as the space where the index holes can be created, and the index holes cannot indicate more detailed information such as the electrical characteristics and the manufacture date of the tape cassette, for example. Accordingly, it is difficult for the tape streaming drive to discriminate different individual tape cassettes caused by the difference of the manufacturing date and the manufacturer. That is, there has been a problem that the tape streaming drive can implement only operational controls set in advance for all tape cassettes to be loaded.
In order to solve such a problem, according to the present invention, a tape driving apparatus comprises tape driving means for running a magnetic tape when a tape cassette storing the magnetic tape is loaded and for recording/reproducing information to/from the magnetic tape; memory driving means for reading/writing management information from/to a memory by implementing a certain communicating process when the tape cassette is provided with the memory for recording management information for managing the recording/reproducing operation to/from the magnetic tape; identification information detecting means for detecting identification information of the tape cassette from the memory; knowledge information storage means for storing knowledge information composed of operation specifying information and conditional information corresponding to the identification information of the tape cassette; evaluating means for evaluating the conditional information based on the identification information; and control means for controlling the certain operation corresponding to the operation specifying information based on the result of evaluation of the evaluating means.
According to the present invention, the tape driving apparatus is configured so as to execute a certain operation by evaluating the knowledge information based on the identification information of the tape cassette detected from the memory means of the loaded tape cassette. That is, it becomes possible to realize the operation corresponding individually to the loaded tape cassette.